Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

Introduction

I vividly remember writing my first program. (My memory is pretty horrible; I don’t vividly remember many things, just things like waking up after oral surgery or watching the birth of our children or that time I was trying to flirt with this girl and she told me that my zipper was down or when I set my shoes on fire in my middle-school gym class or writing my first program…you know, things like that.)

I suppose, looking back, that it was a fairly ambitious program for a newbie (twenty or thirty lines of code, I think). But I was a math major, after all, and we are supposed to be good at things like “logical thinking.” So, I went down to the Reed College computer lab, armed only with a book on programming and my ego, sat down ...